The FBI is reportedly expanding its investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server

The FBI has reportedly expanded its probe into Hillary Clinton's
private email server to examine whether "materially false
statements" were ever provided to agents throughout the course of
the case, Fox News
reported on Thursday.

At the center of the new inquiry, according to Fox News,
is US Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to
the willful falsification of material facts, statements, and
documents during a federal investigation. The code is
meant to penalize individuals who knowingly make false or
misleading statements that waste federal agents' time and
resources.

"This is a broad, brush statute that punishes individuals who are
not direct and fulsome in their answers," former FBI agent
Timothy Gill told Fox. "It is a cover-all. The problem for a
defendant is when their statements cause the bureau to expend
more time, energy, resources to deconflict their statements with
the evidence."

Facing criticism earlier this year for exclusively using a
private server during her time as US secretary of state, Clinton
handed over about 30,000 work-related emails for the State
Department to make public in March. She deleted about 31,000 more
emails she says were personal in nature.

At the time, a US House of Representatives committee requested
access to Clinton's server to ensure that she had not deleted any
work-related emails. But her lawyer, David Kendall, told
the committee that Clinton aides had changed the
server's settings so that only emails she sent and received in
the previous 60 days would be saved.

Bloomberg reported in late September that agents
had been able
to recover at least some of the 30,000 "private" emails
Clinton deleted. Intriguingly, agents
handed some of them over to investigators — indicating that they
are relevant in at least some way to the FBI's ongoing probe.

AP

'A flawed process'

In August, Clinton handed her server over to the FBI, which
has been looking into whether any classified information
ever passed onto the server while she served as secretary of
state.

As such, the probe has been centered
around 18 US Code 793, a section of the Espionage Act
related to gathering and transmitting national-defense
information.

A couple of weeks into the investigation, Charles
McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general,
said that two emails had
been found on Clinton's server from 2009 and 2011 that
contained information regarded
as "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information," one
of the highest levels of classification.

But the intelligence community has since walked back on that
claim.

"The initial determination was based on a flawed process," a
source familiar with the probe told
Politico's Josh Gerstein. "There was an intelligence product
people thought [one of the emails] was based on, but that
actually postdated the email in question."

Thomson
Reuters

After months of negative headlines that battered her
campaign, the Democratic presidential front-runner
apologized in Septemberfor her email arrangement. But
she has insisted that she didn't violate protocol or pass along
material marked classified.

Clinton's use of the server was allowed under State
Department regulations, and, so far, her claim that she never
sent nor received information marked classified has held up under
scrutiny. Though some of her emails did contain classified or
"top secret" information, they were only marked as such after
they passed through her server.

Investigators are also examining what measures Clinton and
her team took to secure the server, since there are rules
governing how it should be configured so it is not vulnerable to
cyberattacks.

So far, reports that hackers in China,
South Korea, Germany, and Russia tried
to break into her server — which was monitored by a
relatively unknown tech firm with no security clearance —
have not helped the 2016 presidential candidate wave away
concerns.

"The fact that Clinton chose to use her personal email instead of
a .gov account shows that she obviously doesn't understand
security," Joe Loomis, CEO of CyberSponse, a software
company, told
Business Insider last month. "What she did is like
inviting spies over to dinner — every device connected to the
internet is an opportunity for them to collect intelligence."

FBI
Director James Comey.Thomson
Reuters

'A foul taste in the FBI's mouth'

In an interview with "60 Minutes" in October, US President Barack
Obama said that though it was probably a "mistake" for Clinton to
use a private email server during her time as secretary of state,
it "is not a situation in which America's national security was
endangered."

"Injecting politics into what is supposed to be a
fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the F.B.I.'s mouth
and makes them fear that no matter what they find, the Justice
Department will take the president's signal and not bring a
case," Ron Hosko, a former senior FBI official who retired in
2014, told The Times.

US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Clinton's top rival for
the Democratic nomination, had made a similar effort to write off
concerns surrounding Clinton's emails a week prior to
Obama's "60 Minutes" appearance.

During a Democratic presidential debate, Sanders
said that he and the American public were "sick and tired of hearing about your damn
emails!" Sanders has since backed off such strong
language, saying last week, "There is an investigation. The FBI
is doing what it's doing."

AP

But investigators are annoyed that the
president and others passed judgment about whether Clinton's
email setup endangered national security when officials have yet
to determine whether her server was compromised by foreign
adversaries.

Alex McGeorge, a cybersecurity expert at Immunity, believes
that continued concern over Clinton's email setup is
warranted.

"Clearly there's a problem with folks in Washington not
taking cyber security seriously and it has serious consequences,"
McGeorge told Business Insider in an email.

He added: "So I think there is a benefit to riding this out
until the bitter end with the hope that every other politician
who witnesses the pain Clinton now has to go to will reflect on
that prior to making security decisions."